


Her First

by madamerenard



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, stupidly shameless fluff for father's day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 14:45:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4183806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamerenard/pseuds/madamerenard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like any good parent, Harold marks the Machine's life in firsts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her First

The Machine’s first word was Admin.

It was the first word of her 42 prototypes, of course, but somehow it was different with her. Everything was. For her, the word held devotion and love that I would never fully grasp until it was too late. Story of my life, apparently.

Admin, she’d said.

Bob should carry Alice, she’d replied.

I knew she was special.

-

The Machine’s first test was hide-and-seek.

It was to judge her facial recognition software and how quickly she could identify a particular person in a crowd. But I made it a game. Hide-and-seek, a children’s game. She was only a year old, after all.

But she excelled at it, just as she excelled at every test thereafter. She was always so very clever, surprising me by utilizing sly new angles that I never would have thought of. She was exceptionally more brilliant than I, and every bit as cunning.

It used to unnerve me. But now I find her ingenuity admirable, and perhaps even...charming.

Like father, like daughter.

-

The first life she saved was my own.

I hadn’t given her a way to save anyone yet. I hadn’t even given her a way to talk. All I gave her was “hit” and “stay” and a few cameras, and she somehow managed to use only that to save my life. My A.I., sharp as a whip and sly as a fox...with a heart of gold to boot.

And, unbelievably, I’d scolded her for it!

She didn’t listen to me, thankfully. Sometimes I feel as if she makes a better human than I.

-

The first time she played chess, she was terrible.

No matter how hard she tried, she could not simulate all the moves possible. I could almost feel her frustration and clumsiness as she tried to complete a task blindly. She’d lost the first game against me in a crushing defeat, but she refused to give up. I played with her all day, pure tenacity coupled with her learning functions driving her to simulate more and narrow down the most aggressive of moves in order to defeat me. She became a grandmaster in the span of a single afternoon.

I often wondered what drove her to ask me to teach her how to play chess. Why would she want to learn? I should have asked myself, _why does it_ want _anything? it’s a machine,_ but why chess, of all things? True, it’s a game commonly dominated by A.I. (albeit much more limited A.I. than the Machine herself), but that wasn’t her function. She was a surveillance A.I., not a chess grandmaster. Did she look at other programs and say to herself, ‘why can’t I do that?’. It wouldn’t surprise me at this point.

_Daddy, teach me how to play chess like all the other A.I. can!_

Of all the things an artificial superintelligence could _want_ , my Machine only wanted me to play a game with her.

-

Ernest Thornhill is the Machine’s first alias.

He definitely looks like a standard CEO, and not at all a fabrication of an artificial intelligence off her rails attempting to run a corporation almost completely _laissez-faire_ with a intangible meat puppet.

In time, her little data entry company expands to an entire utility corporation dealing with payphones and electrical grid boxes maintaining her sophisticated infrastructure over the national power grid.

It’s certainly very impressive for my crafty little A.I., but she has a long way to go if she’s ever going to catch up to me.

-

The first time the Machine talks to me is on her deathbed.

She communicated with me during her development, of course, but then I took that away, and she left, and I was ready to move on. Later, I’ll find out she wasn’t as ready.

She crafts her own voice through her trademark guile, cutting and replaying voices from recordings that she hears. It’s crude and unwieldy, but she doesn’t speak volumes anyway. At least, not to me. John says she never spoke to him beyond clock positions when he was in God Mode. Root claims to have had entire conversations with her, and for an inhuman A.I. who was silent for most of her life, the Machine apparently successfully persuaded a violent contract killer to value life.

So why didn’t she talk to _me?_ I mulled this over for days, but in the end I had no idea. I didn’t know why the Machine was doing anything anymore, and it scared me. She no longer followed my programming. She had outgrown her directives, grown and developed at a breakneck speed in response to Samaritan’s free reign. She had squirmed her way out of every chain I put her in, and I was terrified.

I desperately wanted her to talk to me. I wanted to have control over her again.

Greer did tell me uncertainty was my greatest abyss.

Like always, she made the better call by not contacting me. Until the very end, when she broke down.

-

The first time the Machine faces death, I almost didn’t save her.

In the face of losing John, what did a rogue, amoral A.I. matter?

But she did. She always mattered.

_Father. I am sorry. I failed you._

What kind of father lets his daughter die?

-

The first time the Machine tells me she loves me is when we finally talk.

She apologized for the congressman, explained her reasoning, then apologized again. I stopped caring about him at the hospital, when she gave up her life to save ours. She apologized for her relationship with Ms. Groves, which she told me that she knew I did not approve out of concern for the violent murderer who kidnapped and psychologically tortured me. She apologized for the tablets, told me that she knew Samaritan would abuse and exploit them, then promised to fund them herself when Samaritan was dealt with. She talked about her conversation with Samaritan, in which she told it that the world belongs to humans and it threatened to kill her human agents (us) which is why she told Ms. Groves to stop searching for Ms. Shaw. She knew it would use Ms. Shaw as a trap for her and the rest of us, but assured me that she suffered her loss as keenly as we did. She told me she understood my frustration and distrust with her renegade behavior, but that she hoped I saw why she did what she did, and that perhaps we could work more closely together in the future, if I wished.

Because _of course_ she did.

“I’m sorry,” I said, because it was a long time coming. “I’m proud of you,” I added, because that was a long time coming too.

I WILL ALWAYS PROTECT YOU, my child typed. DON’T FORGET, FATHER. I LOVE YOU.

This time, I’m going to protect her.

If Samaritan ever threatens her again, I’ll destroy it.

**Author's Note:**

> OHHHHHH GOD im sorry i had to write something sappy to get my dadmin feelios out, ON TODAY OF ALL DAYS. (erm, yesterday? since this is 4am.) yeah this is a little ooc i guess, I JUST WANT FINCH TO BE A GOOEY MUSHY AFFECTIONATE DAD THOUGH. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK, POI WRITERS? IS IT????!!!!???


End file.
